Two polite raps of a knuckle sounded against the inner face of the ninth door, and every grain of lime mortar in the lower gallery went cold.
Noll Vey would have preferred a battering ram. He knew what to do with a battering ram. You braced the cross-timbers, dropped the iron counterweights, and shouted something grand enough to make the men on the other side wonder if they were being paid enough to die in a ditch before breakfast. A battering ram had weight and iron and honest bad intentions.
A two-knuckle rap, gentle as an inn maid asking whether a traveler needed hot water for his razor, belonged to a different class of trouble altogether.
Across the narrow flagstone landing, Prit stood frozen beside his oilskin portfolio. The little bone-imp steward had his white filing chalk pinched in his left claw, his grey audit chalk in his right, and his red hazard stub clamped between his front teeth like a ship’s carpenter mid-caulk. Above the newly formed arch—where solid blue-grey hill bedrock had stood seamless and dumb until dawn yesterday—the ledger inscription burned in pale, steady frost:
LAST GUEST DEBT DUE IN ONE HUNDRED NINETY-TWO HOURS.
Behind Prit, Tessa Dene had her hand on the ash hilt of her salvage bread knife, though her knuckles were white and she was staring at the unseamed stone panel rather than drawing the blade. Sergeant Berr stood half a pace in front of her, his borrowed ribs squared beneath his rusted mail…
